Thursday, February 10, 2011

Confidential Confessions

First Confession - I have little use for superheroes and have felt this way since I was a small child. I read lots of comics in the 70s but they were almost all horror, sci-fi or swords and sorcery comics. I do like the Shadow, Justice Inc., and Doc Savage and the Green Hornet, Batman, and Incredible Hulk TV shows (Hey-Bill Bixby was a fine actor) and almost any comic drawn by Jack Kirby but I really have little interest in do-gooders that wear their underwear on the outside of their leotards and certainly don't give a damn about their personal dramas.

I also don't really enjoy superhero RPGs but if I had to play or run one, I’d probably opt for V & V. Riffing off ckutalik’s post on competitive play, I recall playing in a fun V & V one shot in the early 80s where half the players were heroes and half were villains and both teams were racing to the control room of an alien Death Star that had materialized in low earth orbit. I played a villain, Black Wight, an evil ghost that could materialize his fist inside one’s chest. Ouch.

Second Confession – I've played all the Metagaming Micoquests, Death Test, Death Test II, Orb Quest, etc, through several times. I even tried to find the Silver Dragon.

Third Confession – I played few games in the late 80s and early 90s. During this period I played in a series of punk rock and noise bands, bummed around the U.S. and Mexico and did extensive field research in pharmacology. I also wrote a very William S. Burroughs influenced sci-fi novel that has never been published and a Flash Gordon RPG, now sadly lost.

Fourth Confession – I didn't actually buy a copy of Encounter Critical in 1979 and I've never played an edition of D & D or AD & D more recent than First.

Last Confession – When I was a teenaer I had an Atari 2600 and spent a lot of quarters at the video arcade playing Berzerk, Joust, Space War, Tank, Tempest, Spy Hunter and Gauntlet. The first modern computer game that I played extensively was Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I still love that game. I also enjoyed the Homeworld games. In recent years I played a lot of Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. Although I hated the official Neverwinter Nights modules; I think some of the user created modules were fun. I’ve never played WOW but I suggested that my two young daughters might earn some money gold farming a few summers back.

4 comments:

I guess I can come out of the closet now too: hate, hate, hate superheroes and comic books to a slightly lesser extent. (Unless they have cute punk rawk chicks in them and are drawn in black and white.)

Confession One: I never played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. Like many parents in the mid-80s, my mother bought into the whole Satanic Panic deal mainly because her Bible-humping brother (who went to a Bible school so what he says MUST be true) told her D&D was a gateway to Black Masses and virgin sacrifice. Therefore the game was barred in our household. My father, who is Catholic, went along just to keep her happy.

By the time I was old enough to legally disregard my parent's bullcrap, OD&D was gone and replaced by 3rd Edition. I played D20 Traveller so I did by a 3rd Edition Players Book, but never the original game or AD&D until just a few years ago.

Confession Two: I can't say I'm big into supers either. However, I DO like parodies and deconstructions of that genre (e.g. "The Tick," "Watchmen," "The Incredibles").

Confession 3: While I was a huge fan as a kid, I can no longer stand Star Wars; not even the original series. I think the prequels ruined it for me.

@ ckutalik cute punk chicks are awesome, definitely when hyper-sexualized in rpg art...wait...I must be picking up cross blogospheric interference...

@ School Master) Oh those Christian parents that forbid rpgs (or sex or drugs or music, etc.) The kid that introduced me to D&D (with the LBBs) was the son of a minister. His parents forbid Star Trek but were fine with D&D. I never figured that out.

Reviews

Blurbs

"Humanspace Empires is a pulp science fiction game set in the space opera "pre-history" of Prof. M.A.R. Barker's classic fantasy world of Tekumel...[with] a rules engine that implements the best aspects of the original fantasy role playing system and Empire of the Petal Throne..."

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"If you have run—and loved—an older edition of D&D than you will be completely comfortable running this system ... closer in spirit to the simple, pre-TSR OD&D variant Empire of the Petal Throne than the published one."

"A better one for the OSR: playing What If… with the original games. Humanspace Empires is what if with MAR Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne, earlier in the timeline of that game and focused on the space opera aspects of the setting."

"This setting is like a combo of star wars, star trek, & dune on acid mixed with influences of old fashioned pulp in a blender with the setting on high mix! Got that! Its that good & this is only the playtest version!"